Using powerful narrative techniques to drive persuasion
A great example of a radical redesign, pitching the often used, rarely tested homepage “sliders” technique, against a longer design which brings narrative and a single story to encourage donations.
Several principles were used in the new design:
Sliders suck
If your user can’t see something, they can’t be influenced by it. Longer pages are fine if they form a story.
Stories are compelling
Bring a narrative into your copy, don’t just rely on flashy graphics and pithy headlines to engage your readers.
One story is better than a million.
Stalin once said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”. This campaign deals with issues which affect millions of children worldwide, but by focusing on one case study, they create a stronger connection than a general story with no focus.
Test big changes to get big results
Testing aficionados might criticise this case study, saying there is too much going on to be sure what has made the difference, but if you are working with relatively small amounts of traffic, you need to test big changes to get big effects.
When you are going back to first principles of persuasion, you need to test more than just individual pieces of copy or a logo here and there. Sometimes you have to go back to the drawing board to find something new.
Emotion is for copy, not business decisions.
Take a look also at the disagreements in the team about which would win. There’s no room for personal opinions in conversion centred design you have to let the users drive the numbers.
https://whichtestwon.com/case-study/with-sliders-or-without/